All quotes from the novel:
Chapter 1:
Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.
The wall shut in not only the landing field but also the ships that came down out of space, and the men that came on the ships, and the worlds they came from, and the rest of the universe. It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free.
People often came out from the nearby city of Abbenay in hopes of seeing a spaceship, or simply to see the wall. After all, it was the only boundary wall on their world. Nowhere else could they see a sign that said No Trespassing. Adolescents, particularly, were drawn to it.
The word “bastard,” untranslatable in the foreman’s language, meant nothing to her except some kind of foreign term for her people, but she had never liked the sound of it, or the captain’s tone, or the captain.
He had always feared that this would happen, more than he had ever feared death. To die is to lose the self and rejoin the rest. He had kept himself, and lost the rest.
“I am well,” he said at last, at random.
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It did not appease the man. “Please come with me. I’m a doctor.”
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“I am well.”
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“Please come with me, Dr. Shevek!”
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“You are a doctor,” Shevek said after a pause. “I am not. I am called Shevek.”
Shevek drowned them all out: “Unlock the door!”
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The door slid open, the doctor looked in. At the sight of his bald, anxious, yellowish face Shevek’s wrath cooled and retreated into an inward darkness. He said, “The door was locked.”
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“I’m sorry, Dr. Shevek—a precaution—contagion—keeping the others out—”
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“To lock out, to lock in, the same act,” Shevek said, looking down at the doctor with light, remote eyes.
“No religion? Are we stones, on Anarres?”
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“I mean established religion—churches, creeds—”
“Educated men certainly would understand that, these officers are ignorant.”
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“But is it only bigots, then, who are allowed to go out into the cosmos?”
The Chancellor of the University talked to him charmingly, the First Director of the nation talked to him seriously, he was introduced to ambassadors, astronauts, physicists, politicians, dozens of people, all of whom had long titles and honorifics both before and after their names, and they talked to him, and he answered them, but he had no memory later of what anyone had said, least of all himself.
Chapter 2:
The knobby baby stood up. His face was a glare of sunlight and anger. His diapers were about to fall off. “Mine!” he said in a high, ringing voice. “Mine sun!”
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“It is not yours,” the one-eyed woman said with the mildness of utter certainty. “Nothing is yours. It is to use. It is to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it.” And she picked the knobby baby up with gentle inexorable hands and set him aside, out of the square of sunlight.
They had picked up the idea of “prisons” from episodes in the Life of Odo, which all of them who had elected to work on History were reading. There were many obscurities in the book, and Wide Plains had nobody who knew enough history to explain them; but by the time they got to Odo’s years in the Fort in Drio, the concept “prison” had become self-explanatory. And when a circuit history teacher came through the town he expounded the subject, with the reluctance of a decent adult forced to explain an obscenity to children. Yes, he said, a prison was a place where a State put people who disobeyed its Laws. But why didn’t they just leave the place? They couldn’t leave, the doors were locked. Locked? Like the doors on a moving truck, so you don’t fall out, stupid! But what did they do inside one room all the time? Nothing. There was nothing to do. You’ve seen pictures of Odo in the prison cell in Drio, haven’t you? Image of defiant patience, bowed grey head, clenched hands, motionless in encroaching shadows. Sometimes prisoners were sentenced to work. Sentenced? Well, that means a judge, a person given power by the Law, ordered them to do some kind of physical labor. Ordered them? What if they didn’t want to do it? Well, they were forced to do it; if they didn’t work, they were beaten. A thrill of tension went through the children listening, eleven- and twelve-year-olds, none of whom had ever been struck, or seen any person struck, except in immediate personal anger.
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Tirin asked the question that was in all their minds: “You mean, a lot of people would beat up one person?”
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“Yes.”
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“Why didn’t the others stop them?”
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“The guards had weapons. The prisoners did not,” the teacher said. He spoke with the violence of one forced to say the detestable, and embarrassed by it.
